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On October 10th, a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas officially ended two years of war in the Gaza Strip. The deal, which was pushed by the Trump Administration, left Israel in control of a little more than half of Gaza, with Hamas controlling the rest. Several Israeli soldiers and some four hundred Palestinians have been killed since the agreement went into effect. (The over-all death toll since the conflict began includes approximately two thousand Israelis and seventy-one thousand Palestinians.) The availability of humanitarian aid in the territory has improved—the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is backed by the United Nations and other non-governmental organizations, has said that Gaza is no longer experiencing famine—but access to food and medicine remains at dangerously substandard levels.

I recently spoke by phone with Ayed Abu Ramadan, the chairman of the Gaza Chamber of Commerce, about the current situation on the ground. (He was in Gaza City when we spoke.) Abu Ramadan was elected to the position by other business leaders in 2023; the chamber, which represents thousands of businesses, is not part of the Hamas-led government. It has been trying to help restart Gaza’s economy, and Abu Ramadan is considered an important actor in future reconstruction efforts. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the humanitarian crisis still facing Palestinians, what has and has not changed since the ceasefire, and why he decided to stay in Gaza.

How would you describe the situation in Gaza right now?

I describe it as a humanitarian catastrophe, despite the fact that the mass killing has stopped. An inhumane situation persists in Gaza. There are roughly nine hundred thousand people living in tents and on the streets without running water—sitting, sleeping, cooking, and going to the toilet in the same place, which is usually a tent that does not protect them from rain, or from sun or heat. Kids cannot go to school. There is no proper health care, no economy, no jobs. It’s really terrible.

And what about in terms of food and medical aid being able to enter the territory? Israel cut off aid completely for a couple of months in March, April, and May of 2025. How much food has been able to get in since this ceasefire began, almost three months ago?

Israel is allowing partial aid to come into Gaza. They are allowing, for example, rice and flour—things like that. But they are heavily restricting, for example, eggs, meat, and chicken. And, in order to bring in these things, you have to pay something called “coördination commissions.” For example, if you want to bring in a truckload of frozen chicken or meat, you sometimes have to pay as much as a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Inflation is going up in Gaza, and people have lost their purchasing power because they are not working. Around eighty per cent of people are unemployed. Around ninety per cent of families are below the poverty line.

So, again, Israel is putting restrictions on entry of aid into Gaza. They’re preventing school supplies from entering Gaza. So even the informal school programs cannot really proceed. Health care is really a problem, because there are not enough medicines. Even for chronic diseases, for people with cholesterol or heart problems, only with great difficulty can they find some quantities of their needed medications. Israel is controlling the entry points, the crossings into Gaza, and preventing essential goods from entering. Basic necessities are prevented from coming in. So it is a big problem.

Who’s interacting with the Israelis here? Who is trying to get supplies on the trucks? Is this being done through people in Gaza, like yourself, or is it being done by aid agencies?

This is mainly happening through humanitarian and U.N. agencies, such as UNICEF. They are talking to the Israelis directly. Humanitarian agencies have to apply for coördination and the applications go to the Israelis, but there is often no reply. We, as business leaders, have tried to talk to the Israelis several times throughout the past two years, but they are always ignoring our correspondence. Israelis are talking to certain Palestinian traders to tell them that they are allowed to bring in some food items, but they are not communicating with the Chamber of Commerce or the Palestinian Authority, or any official entity in Gaza. So they are talking to specific merchants, but we are not sure why. [A spokesman for COGAT, an Israeli agency responsible for facilitating the entry of aid into Gaza, told The New Yorker that it does not deal with the Chamber of Commerce in Gaza, but that “a limited number of local merchants have been approved by the defense establishment.”]

Is this about just making it difficult for Palestinians?

There is no explanation from the Israelis, and there are no comments from their side. But I think it’s economic warfare. I think it’s to allow some Israeli-favored people to profit here from this. It’s also to shock Palestinians so their health will deteriorate. It’s about deepening malnutrition, making life difficult. [More than thirty separate aid organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, had their licenses to operate in Gaza suspended on January 1st, after Israel claimed that they had not provided information about their local employees. These groups will be forced to fully stop operations by March. The COGAT spokesman told The New Yorker, “Despite attempts by several international organizations and various actors in the international arena to falsely portray the State of Israel as preventing or delaying the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, we clarify that the reality is entirely the opposite of the published claims.”]

The Gaza Strip is more or less divided between the half controlled by Hamas and the half that is controlled by the Israelis. How has this changed what life is like for Gazans?

In terms of the half of the Strip that is controlled by Israel, they’re not allowing anybody in, and anybody who comes close to what they call the yellow line may get shot or killed. So all Gazans are living inside the Hamas-controlled side, and that’s not enabling us to access our farmland, for example, or garbage-dump sites. There are also cities on the other side, even though they have been largely demolished. Factories and industrial areas are also on that side. There were several wastewater-treatment plants, too. It’s an essential part of Gaza, which is so small. It’s really causing a difficult situation.

Is one of your concerns that this is going to become a long-term border, and that the Gaza Strip and the people who live in it are going to be permanently stuck in the part of Gaza that they’re in now?

No. I think that we have a ceasefire agreement. We have a Trump plan, and we are sure, or hopeful, that the Trump plan will work and President Trump will be able to, if not convince, then force the Israelis to stick to the plan and withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

This is your hope, you’re saying?

It’s hope, and really we believe that it will most likely happen.

Is there a reason that you’re more hopeful about this than I am?

[Laughs.] Because I want to believe it. It’s our only hope. The situation cannot really continue like this.

How would you describe the attitude toward Hamas in the Gaza Strip now?

In what sense? They are controlling everything in Gaza. They are trying to help the situation in Gaza. They are providing security for us, which is most important. You cannot leave things in a vacuum. If you leave New York in a vacuum, without security, without police, what will happen? Same thing in Gaza. So we’re very comfortable with their keeping the security in Gaza. For instance, before the signing of the ceasefire agreement, there was lots of looting of humanitarian aid, and these looters were backed up. They were militias backed up by Israel and protected by Israel. The main one was the Abu Shabab group. They used to loot trucks, and then take refuge in Israeli-controlled areas. That has stopped. It stopped because the de-facto government is preventing them from doing it.

I know that a lot of prominent businesspeople, including you, decided to write a letter to Trump urging an end to the war, right before the ceasefire came into effect. Some of the people who signed that letter were very critical of Hamas in other venues. Was there a division about how much to be critical in the letter?

Anybody in Gaza can be critical of Hamas. It’s O.K. We have freedom to talk about Hamas or anybody else. [Palestinians in Gaza, including journalists, have been physically assaulted for criticizing or reporting negatively on Hamas. Since the ceasefire went into effect, Hamas has also carried out executions of people whom it claims were political rivals or collaborators with Israel.] I mean, it’s a personal opinion, so there’s no problem with that. Is that your question? Maybe I did not understand your question.

Well, I know you’ve said that you think the Palestinian Authority will be better able to bring about a long-term solution and a two-state solution, which you advocate.

Well, it’s our only hope, actually. We want to be united with the West Bank, and the Palestinian Authority is the best scenario for this. We hope we will have elections. I mean, Palestinians deserve to decide, and to have elections—they deserve to select their representatives and to have an exchange of authority.

Right, because the last elections in Gaza were a couple of decades ago, correct?

Exactly. Yes.

Can you talk a little bit about what your job is?

I’m the chairman of the Gaza Chamber of Commerce, Industry, and Agriculture. We are trying here to help our members get their papers for reactivating bank accounts, or to start businesses both outside and within Gaza. We’re trying to help them organize local markets, and coördinate or actually do some networking for them with humanitarian actors. And we do trainings. But there isn’t much we can do, because of Israeli restrictions. They are even preventing some fuel for the private sector. They are preventing the entry of agricultural seeds like tomato, cucumber, whatever, with the intention to keep all people dependent on humanitarian aid and not to be productive. So my job is really difficult, because there isn’t much I can do, but we’re trying to promote, for example, electronic payments, because all the banknotes in Gaza, the cash, is getting worn out and Israel won’t allow us to replace these banknotes.

So we do lots of advocacy work. We collect information about local markets, about some economic indicators. We produce reports in that regard. We make the international community and humanitarian actors aware of the situation, so they can be informed when making plans. We are also doing some really small projects, trying to help people in the food-production sector start or improve their businesses, but we are making very limited interventions because of the lack of finance and production-input materials.

A lot of people in your position or somewhat similar positions managed to leave Gaza during the war. You did not. Can you talk about why you stayed?

Yes. When the war started, I was new in my position: I was elected at the beginning of 2023, and nine months later the war broke out. I felt that I was obliged to stay with the people who elected me in Gaza. I really like Gaza so much, and I don’t think I can stay out of Gaza for long. And what am I going to do outside? Being a Palestinian, it is very difficult to be somewhere outside. And I know many people are in Egypt now, but they are in difficult situations economically. I didn’t think that it would go on this long, of course. But I’m very happy that I did not leave because being outside Gaza for such a long time is not an easy thing.

I know that the humanitarian situation is still not great. I know that people are still dying. I’m just curious what it feels like in the Strip, and if people have become more hopeful or not in the last couple of months since the ceasefire.

To be honest, I cannot talk for all people in Gaza and about their experiences. I’m one of the few lucky people, in that I still have my home and I have a concrete roof. I have tents all around my house, and I see them every morning when I go to work and when I come back. When I go out, and I am properly dressed and have combed my hair, I really feel ashamed. But people can take these hardships and their life goes on, and they are very hopeful and thankful for God. And when their tent is flooded, or when their tent flies with the wind, there’s so much resilience—they keep on trying and trying to make a life. And kids are playing football in the street, and people have made stalls to sell little things, like small shops. People are really trying. They are being very resilient, which makes me feel really good and hopeful despite the inhumane situation they are living in.

Do you feel that there’s resentment toward people who’ve been more fortunate?

Not at all. Not at all. I don’t know what’s deep in their heart, but from dealing with them—I mean, there are thousands around me. I’ve never been harassed or had anyone talk that way to me.

When you talk to people or when you just think about how things are going, does this feel like just another month in the post-October 7th era for Gaza, or does it feel like something new is starting?

The ceasefire has started a new era in Gaza. You can’t imagine the amount of killing that was happening beforehand, and the amount of fear. We were almost sure that we would be kicked out of the Gaza Strip. Things were going in that direction until President Trump forced Israel to stop the war, and we are really, really grateful for this. We can take any hardship and we can manage our lives in Gaza, but we cannot do the same outside of Gaza. We recognize the amount of hardship awaiting us in order to achieve our hopes and dreams, because we have Israel here, who does not want us to be in Gaza. But we are determined, and we are insisting on staying in Gaza. We have no other place to go to, really, and we don’t want to go to any other place. We don’t want to go to Somalia, Indonesia, or even the United States. We are not really interested. We like Gaza. We want to stay in Gaza. We want to have a life in Gaza. ♦

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Since she reëmerged as a star in the 2024 film “The Substance,” Demi Moore has been very busy. She has a major role in the current season of Taylor Sheridan’s “Landman” series, and she has two highly anticipated films coming out this year: a science-fiction film directed by Boots Riley, and “Strange Arrivals,” alongside Colman Domingo, about a couple who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. She sat down at The New Yorker Festival in the fall with the staff writer Jia Tolentino to discuss her varied career and how she has dealt with the pressures of the industry.

This episode was recorded live at The New Yorker Festival, on October 25, 2025.

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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

These are fractious times for the fraternal duos of filmmaking. The Coen brothers, once inseparable, have parted artistic ways—Joel with a black-and-white Shakespeare adaptation, “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (2021), and Ethan with two colorful bursts of slapstick noir, “Drive-Away Dolls” (2024) and “Honey Don’t!” (2025). The Safdies are also flying solo: this past year brought us Benny’s “The Smashing Machine,” a lightweight but bruising portrait of a champion wrestler, and Josh’s “Marty Supreme,” a whiplash-inducing tale of a Ping-Pong powerhouse. Fittingly, more than a few observers have been eager to turn art into blood sport, pitting Coen against Coen, Safdie against Safdie, and theorizing about which sibling is the greater talent.

God forbid we should ever wage such a debate over the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who, on the evidence of their new drama, “Young Mothers,” are neither splitting up nor slowing down. Over roughly three decades, the Dardennes, now in their seventies, have built a filmography of such remarkable artistic, dramatic, and political consistency as to suggest a single cinematic consciousness in two bodies. In their breakthrough work, “La Promesse” (1997), they spun a taut realist thriller about a scrappy Belgian teen-ager, an exploiter of undocumented immigrants whose first stirrings of conscience began with the simplest thing: a promise he made, and refused to break, to a dying man. With that film, the Dardenne brothers effectively extended a vow of their own to the audience, one founded on closely held principles: sharp-edged realism, keen observation, and, crucially, extraordinary speed. A typical Dardenne movie runs about ninety minutes and spans, at most, a few days of narrative time. (The labor-rights drama “Two Days, One Night,” from 2014, is hardly their only film that could have borne that title.) A protagonist’s history matters, the filmmakers know, but life’s most significant confrontations—the ones that reveal who we are and what we’re made of—have a way of assailing us in an instant.

Decades later, the Dardennes’ impact on cinematic realism can scarcely be overstated, and they have, to some extent, been eclipsed by their own much revered influence. Their jagged techniques, absorbed by filmmakers the world over, have softened; they still follow their characters about in handheld long takes, but gone is their habit—deployed most radically in “The Son,” their masterpiece from 2003—of zeroing in on the back of a protagonist’s ear. Even so, they have never come close to breaking faith with those essential principles. At the heart of their work is the question of what we owe one another—what decency spurs us to do, and at what cost. In “The Son,” a carpenter weighs the possibility of avenging his child’s murder. In “The Kid with a Bike” (2012), a hairdresser is compelled, by forces beyond her understanding, to intervene on behalf of a young boy who has no one else. The realities of poverty, neglect, racism, and violence are harsh constants in the Dardennes’ working-class universe, but the filmmakers believe no less intently in the persistence of goodness—a force that is all the more powerful, they insist, for the stubborn unpredictability with which it can take root.

Goodness is not hard to find in “Young Mothers.” The film is set in and around a maternity home in Liège where the staff look after their charges, all teen-agers, with tough-minded compassion. Most of the mothers have already given birth, though the first one we meet, Jessica (Babette Verbeek), is in the final days of her pregnancy, which she spends trying to meet with her own biological mother, Morgane (India Hair), who gave her up for adoption years earlier. But Morgane is reluctant, and Jessica’s sense of abandonment, a lifelong wound that has now reopened, flashes into an intensely physical neediness: back at the shelter, she weeps and clings to a care worker, practically biting into the woman’s shoulder.

Jessica intends to raise her daughter—she’s already picked out a name, Alba—partly as a corrective to Morgane’s “dumping” of her: “Not even an animal would do what she did,” she says. But the shelter workers know better, and so do the Dardennes. Their camera will soon alight on Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan), a grave, clear-eyed girl of fifteen who has decided to have her newborn daughter adopted, and knows in her bones that it’s the right thing to do. Her mom, Nathalie (an unnervingly steely Christelle Cornil), disagrees, and urges Ariane to leave the shelter and move back in with her so they can raise the child together. Ariane refuses, and a trip to her mother’s apartment clarifies why: Nathalie is an alcoholic, with a vicious temper and a history of dating violent men. There’s no future there for Ariane, or for her child.

Perla (Lucie Laruelle) takes a more conditional view of her situation: she wants to keep her infant son, Noé, but mainly to hold on to the father, Robin (Günter Duret), who has just been released from juvenile detention. One look at Robin, who accepts a joint from Perla but barely acknowledges the stroller she’s pushing, tells us that family stability is not in the cards. Perla, maddeningly, takes longer to catch on, but her stubborn pursuit of a romantic-domestic fantasy is also proof of the Dardennes’ rigor: realization takes its time, if it comes at all. And, even then, it isn’t always enough. Another young mother, Julie (Elsa Houben), initially seems the most fortunate of the group, as she and her boyfriend, Dylan (Jef Jacobs), are committed to each other and to their little Mia. Yet both parents are recovering addicts, and not even Julie’s awareness of the difficult path ahead can keep her yearning for a fix at bay.

The Dardennes had planned to center the story on just one young mother until they visited a real-life maternity home in Liège and, struck by the range of experiences they encountered, expanded their narrative focus accordingly. (They shot much of “Young Mothers” at the home, with no additional lighting or décor.) The result is something relatively novel for them: a film that juggles four protagonists—five if you count a departing resident, Naïma (Samia Hilmi), though we spend mere minutes in her company, most of them at a farewell lunch where she thanks everyone for helping her get back on her feet. “You showed me,” she says, “there’s no shame in being a single mother.”

I wanted more of Naïma, who comes from a Muslim family, and whose reference to shame—compounded by her description of her relatives’ refusal to see her or her baby daughter—has an obvious cultural dimension. But those struggles remain offscreen; Naïma’s season at the shelter is coming to an end, and the movie, graceful yet pragmatic, knows that not every story here can be told. Perhaps that’s why the Dardennes don’t belabor the dynamics among the mothers themselves, who all get along well enough. We catch stray glimpses of naps, feedings, and meal-prep schedules (a diaper-change disaster might have heightened the realism), and we see the reflexive sternness of the staff—they’re here to guide, not coddle—when a mother shirks her responsibilities. The home is a lively hub of activity, but its solidarity and support go only so far. No wonder the film spends so much time outside the shelter, where the women have to figure things out on their own.

Do these four stories, with their subtle yet strategic variations of attitude and circumstance, smack of a troubling tidiness—a desire to cover as much sociological ground as possible with each pass of the narrative baton? “Young Mothers” won the Dardennes a screenplay prize at Cannes last year, which may only corroborate the charge that their naturalism here feels a touch too scripted. With less time to spend on each story, they lean more on exposition, which doesn’t play to their (or most anyone’s) cinematic strengths. The filmmakers are at their best when they bring us into direct communion with their characters’ unspoken thoughts, but, with the exception of Ariane—Halloy Fokan’s gaze is a killer—we don’t linger with any of them long enough to cultivate that degree of psychological intimacy.

Yet “Young Mothers” holds us all the same: not with the urgency, perhaps, of its predecessors but with an emotional pull as lovely and irresistible as the sudden dawning of a smile on a baby’s face. The Dardennes haven’t made their usual thriller of conscience; they know that their characters have several possible choices, none of them perfect, but more than one of them conceivably right. If the film’s interplay of stories tilts toward the schematic, it also encourages us to look past the straightforward trappings of realism and discern a deeper structure of rhyme and rhythm. One woman kisses her granddaughter for the last time; another meets hers for the first. Ariane asks a pair of adoptive parents to teach her daughter to play an instrument; Julie and Dylan look on, delighted, as their baby hears a dazzling burst of Mozart. The Dardennes, typically allergic to the manipulations of music, here remind us that life is as cyclical as a rondo, and just as swift. Best to spend it, while we still can, with those we love. ♦

I wait all year for January to roll around again—it’s New York’s hottest time of the year, theatrically speaking, when the city fields as much experimental work in one month as it does in the other eleven combined. Several of my favorite festivals happen simultaneously, including the much-loved and long-lived Under the Radar, which this year spreads its umbrella over thirty-two productions.

Marianne Rendón in Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein’s “Friday Night Rat Catchers.”Photograph by Maria Baranova

Anne Gridley’s “Watch Me Walk,” directed by Eric Ting, will be at Soho Rep (at its current digs in Playwrights Horizons); Elevator Repair Service premières its version of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” at the Public, applying its deconstructionist fervor to the postmodern masterpiece; and Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein bring back their “Friday Night Rat Catchers,” after a run at New York Live Arts. This last show contains a beautiful, tragicomic solo for Engelstein, in which she becomes a sort of slow-motion avalanche, dancing as rock after rock drops out of her coat onto the floor.

Under the Radar also provides a vital connection with international work, at venues such as the Irish Arts Center, which will host the Dublin-based company Brokentalkers, and PAC NYC, which welcomes “The Visitors,” a “first contact” drama from Moogahlin Performing Arts and the Sydney Theatre Company. At the same time, the catalogue groans under the weight of all the local talent working at the cutting edge of the form. Tina Satter, the HawtPlates, and Eric Berryman all have pieces on display.

The Prototype festival includes my most-anticipated work in the month’s lineup, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar’s reconstruction of the “post rock” opera “What to Wear,” at BAM, which was originally a 2006 collaboration between the composer Michael Gordon and the much-missed avant-garde director Richard Foreman. And the Exponential Festival, which contains the fringiest offerings in the January slate, will be in a number of Brooklyn spaces, with pieces like the Goat Exchange’s “Time Passes,” which incorporates text from Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” and—this seems almost too obvious, given the weather—“Jaws.” I think that show might sum up my excitement for the whole micro-season. You jump into the ocean, hoping for the best, but also a little scared. Wild things are waiting in the water.—Helen Shaw

The Nashville guitarist William Tyler has spent his career outlining the reaches of ambient country, with instrumental epics that meander into a vast expanse, tinkering with folk, pop rock, and Americana. After stints in the bands Lambchop and Silver Jews, Tyler ventured into psychedelia as a soloist in 2010, with rustic music that feels infinite. He joins the Virginian guitar virtuoso Yasmin Williams to perform a set as part of Winter Jazzfest’s Brooklyn Marathon. Together these dextrous artists showcase not just the boundlessness of the finger-style playing but its power over the imagination.—Sheldon Pearce (Music Hall of Williamsburg; Jan. 10.)

If you watched Richard Linklater’s new film “Blue Moon” and found yourself wondering whether Lorenz Hart was right to hate “Oklahoma!,” or if his bitterness over his breakup with Richard Rodgers simply clouded his ability to enjoy it, there’s a way to find out. This January, treat yourself to clarity—and toe-tapping—at Carnegie Hall, where the Orchestra of St. Luke’s presents “Oklahoma! In Concert.” Starring such musical-theatre pros as Emmett O’Hanlon, Micaela Diamond, Jasmine Amy Rogers, and “S.N.L.” alum Ana Gasteyer, the concert will do away with the corn-y set dressing and focus on the music. Hart may have questioned whether that’s a good thing, but you can be the judge.—Jane Bua (Carnegie Hall; Jan. 12.)

Pam Tanowitz’s “Pastoral.”Photograph by Maria Baranova

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 is called the “Pastoral” Symphony because of its evocations of birdsong, brooks, and heavy weather. In “Pastoral,” a delightful collaboration among the choreographer Pam Tanowitz, the composer Caroline Shaw, and the painter Sarah Crowner, Shaw cleverly samples and remixes Beethoven’s score using a live woodwind trio, archival tracks, and field recordings of crickets. Floral paintings by Crowner cover curtains and flats with which the graceful dancers wittily and poetically rearrange space, as Tanowitz’s choreography swirls in complex patterns. This “Pastoral” is as much about the contemplation of art, and the making of it, as it is about nature.—Brian Seibert (Rose Theatre; Jan. 11-13.)

In Molière’s seventeenth-century satire “Tartuffe,” the titular religious grifter (Matthew Broderick, keeping his powder too dry) buffaloes a wealthy man, Orgon (David Cross), who doesn’t notice that his spiritual counsellor has designs on his wife, Elmire (Amber Gray). Lucas Hnath’s sometimes-amusing new adaptation, directed by Sarah Benson, does contain certain vigorous touches: the outraged flouncing of Orgon’s son, Damis (Ryan J. Haddad), for example. But Enver Chakartash’s furbelowed, ballooning costumes set a tone of sumptuous buoyancy that the ensemble as a whole rarely finds, despite the efforts of several excellent clowns; Hnath’s awkward new verse keeps weighing them down, and there’s rather more comic inertia here than farce.—Helen Shaw (Reviewed in our issue of 12/29/25 & 1/5/26.) (New York Theatre Workshop; through Jan. 24.)

“Ñañigo Burial,” from 1976.Art work by Ana Mendieta / Courtesy © the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC / ARS / Marian Goodman Gallery

As the Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta’s star has risen, what she did during her life has sometimes been overshadowed by the dramatic circumstances of her death. (In 1985, at the age of thirty-six, she fell out a window in her apartment; her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre, was charged with and acquitted of murder.) This exhibition goes “Back to the Source,” to borrow its subtitle, reëstablishing the haunting and visceral terrain of Mendieta’s work. The focus is her “Silueta” series, from the nineteen-seventies, for which she photographed outlines of figures that she made in the earth. They showcase a rooted, searching spirituality and her gift for turning absence into presence, as in the exhibition’s only sculpture, “Ñañigo Burial” (1976), which reads as a kind of premonitory memorial: forty-seven black candles melting down into a topographic silhouette of Mendieta’s body.—Jillian Steinhauer (Marian Goodman; through Jan. 17.)

MOMA’s annual series “To Save and Project” gathers noteworthy restorations and rediscoveries from around the world. This year it unearths a set of short films made between 1908 and 1913 by D. W. Griffith, including a giddily eccentric comedy, “Those Awful Hats,” set in a movie theatre where action is taken against viewers who refuse to remove their elaborate headwear. The supreme stylist of silent cinema, F. W. Murnau, directed an audacious silent version of Molière’s “Tartuffe,” in 1925. Murnau turns the comedy, about a faux-pious fraudster, into a seething melodrama—and a cautionary film-within-a-film; MOMA presents it in both the U.S. version and the longer, recently restored German one.—Richard Brody (MOMA; Jan. 8-Feb. 2.)

The raison d’être of Ornithology, a bohemian jazz club in Bushwick situated under the rumbling J/Z line, is scrawled in white text on its exterior façade, next to a mural of a pinstriped Charlie Parker blowing away on his sax: “Bird lives.” This insistence on the genre as a thriving subculture, not yet relegated to graffitied-over plaques of scenes-once-prosperous, grounds the ethos of the joint, which hosts a constant rotation of some of the most exciting combos in New York. On a recent frigid Tuesday, a pair of seasoned patrons had tickets for the Ornithology Big Band, a ten-piece group, who had set up under some dusty Moroccan-style rugs hanging from the rafters. Across the room, Pharoah Sanders, in a large black-and-white portrait, looked on with an expression of discontent. The patrons took their seats by the bar as the group launched into a cover of “My Favorite Things,” from “The Sound of Music.” Sometime during the coda, the guests’ cocktails arrived. The Autumn in New York, a tangy, gin-heavy blend of lemon and crème de violette, was just fine, and not quite worth its sixteen-dollar price tag. The Calcutta Cutie, however, made up for it, with a pear-and-chai-infused vodka—sweet, refreshing, and just bitter enough. It lasted through the end of the third song, penned by one of the saxophonists, who glanced anxiously around the room as his bandmates took solos. “Don’t fuck this up,” his furrowed brow all but yelled. As the set wound down with the mournful Duke Ellington number “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” the guests got to work on a Juju, a delightful, ginger-forward mix of rosemary-infused rum and lime. Spit valves full, chops spent, the band finished their set, and the patrons, ears ringing, set out into the night.

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant star in “Holiday,” from 1938.Photograph from Everett

“Holiday” (1938)

One of three pictures that the director George Cukor made with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, this witty, melancholy masterwork builds to one of the greatest New Year’s Eve-party sequences ever captured on film—a simply magical interlude, in which two characters, who have fallen in love before our eyes, see their dreams realized and perhaps dashed in the same instance. Few films leave you with a more hopeful sense of life and love’s possibilities, but fewer still are also more achingly aware of how fragile—and elusive—those possibilities are.

“Breathless” (1960)

Jean-Luc Godard’s sixty-five-year-old début feature, presently being saluted in Richard Linklater’s terrific making-of comedy, “Nouvelle Vague,” remains one of the freshest starts in movie history. To see it again (and again) is to feel an intoxicating sense of creative rejuvenation in every cut and frame.

“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” (1974)

Ellen Burstyn justly won an Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s wonderful drama, about a recently widowed mother who, determined to seize a new life from the jaws of tragedy, moves West with her son and sets out to revive a long-ago-aborted singing career. See it especially for the great Diane Ladd, whose death in November made 2025 that much harder to bear.

“Into Great Silence” (2007)

Every new year calls for an altitude adjustment. In 2002 and 2003, the German director Philip Gröning spent months filming at the Grande Chartreuse, a monastery located high up in the French Alps, and emerged with one of the most genuinely awe-inspiring nonfiction films of that year, or any year—a cleansing, rigorously patient immersion in the daily and even hourly rhythms of Carthusian monks, whose vows of silence incline the viewer toward their own state of contemplative rapture. “Into Great Silence” isn’t available for streaming in the U.S., so, barring a revival screening near you, you’ll have to purchase a DVD to watch it, which is fitting for a film that encourages patience and the avoidance of shortcuts.

“Brittany Runs a Marathon” (2019)

I have run a few half-marathons in my life, but have never (and never will) run a full one. But whenever my inspiration flags and laziness makes me loath to jog for even a mile, I flash back fondly on Paul Downs Colaizzo’s winning comedy of self-care. Jillian Bell is terrific in the title role of a New Yorker who, as the movie begins, can barely make it to the next corner—and, by the end, has defied everyone’s expectations, her own most of all.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Come again, Connor Storrie?
• High highs and low lows
• Let Sandra Oh fix the masculinity crisis

Last fall, the jewelry designer Kindred Lubeck took an elevator up six floors to a high-end showroom in New York’s diamond district. She was buzzed inside a fluorescent-lit vestibule, then waited; the front door had to lock securely behind her before a second could open. On the other side, a man in a gray suit named Chirag Mehta greeted her.

Mehta is the president of Sim Gems USA, a diamond dealer that sources investment-worthy stones for discerning billionaires; his customers include Nita Ambani, the wife of the richest man in Asia. Mehta had only recently learned of Lubeck’s work. In August, she was revealed as the designer of Taylor Swift’s engagement ring—an old-mine brilliant cut set in a yellow-gold band that Lubeck engraved by hand. (Good luck zooming in on the photos.) By October, Lubeck had been tapped by Sotheby’s for a closed-bid online auction of three engraved rings; in December, she auctioned two more, including one five-carat, old-mine-cut stone with an obvious resemblance to Swift’s.

Lubeck, who has aquamarine eyes and long, wavy hair, cuts an ethereal figure, like an elven noble. Her father is a goldsmith, and she spent much of the pandemic in her home town, a coastal community in Florida called Neptune Beach, shadowing him at his shop. She became obsessed with metalsmithing, and started pursuing it full time, honing an antique-inspired aesthetic that quickly gained traction on social media. By the time she moved to New York, in 2024, she had started her own business, Artifex Fine, and she had a loyal following in the indie jewelry world.

Swift showed one of Lubeck’s Instagram videos to her fiancé, Travis Kelce, a year and a half before their engagement. “When I saw the ring, I was, like, ‘I know who made that, I know who made that!’ ” Swift said in a radio interview. For Lubeck, it was an enormous break; now she has the trust of dealers such as Mehta, who are often willing to loan stones to designers for speculative projects. On Lubeck’s visit, Mehta opened a safe the size of a refrigerator and plucked out a fifty-carat-plus natural diamond—“Bezos-level,” he said—and set it on a gray fabric tray for her to examine. All Mehta asked was that Lubeck take a photo with him for social media.

In the past, enormous gems were typically used in cocktail rings, for special occasions. Engagement rings were meant for everyday wear. But many of today’s celebrities prefer to blur the distinction: Lauren Sánchez Bezos’s diamond was rumored to weigh in at around thirty carats; the stone that Cristiano Ronaldo gave to his girlfriend, Georgina Rodríguez, whom he met at a Gucci store in 2017, has been estimated to be thirty-five carats. Swift’s stone is large—industry experts have estimated anywhere from seven to ten carats, or about the size of a rounded-oval press-on nail. Yet its style diverges significantly from the icy, minimalist chic that has shaped engagement-ring tastes in recent years. (In 2018, Hailey Bieber’s ring—an oval-cut diamond on a thin, solitaire band—set the standard.)

Swift’s diamond is an old-mine cut—a faceting pattern that typically indicates that a gem was cut in a period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the world’s major diamond mines were still in Brazil and India. Lubeck couldn’t share the stone’s provenance. On social media, the rare-gem dealer Anup Jogani, who supplied Lubeck with the stones for her recent Sotheby’s auctions, called it the “ring of the century.”

In the antique-jewelry scene, the reveal was the equivalent of a Super Bowl victory. “I think I cried,” Marion Fasel, the author of “The History of Diamond Engagement Rings,” told me. “My vintage-jewelry world was so excited—they lost their minds.” Historically, old-mine-cut diamonds have been a niche obsession. Compared with the ubiquitous round-brilliant cut of today (think: diamond emoji), old-miners tend to have large, chunky facets and taller profiles, with thick crowns and long pavilions. Fasel was able to classify Swift’s ring as an old-miner because of the small, dark circle, or “open culet,” visible at the center—unlike many popular diamond shapes today, which taper to a point, old-miners have flatter bottoms.

At the time these stones were fashioned, light was often provided by candlelight or gas lamps and lapidaries, or gem cutters, did everything by hand, meaning that their work was not always perfectly symmetrical. Compared with modern cuts, which are often described as “sharp,” “intense,” and “quick” for the way that they refract white, or “brilliant” light, old-miners manifest a different kind of romantic fantasy, with a warm glow that calls to mind the sepia of an old Hollywood movie. “I just watch it like it’s a TV,” Swift said, of her ring.

At the Sim Gems USA showroom, Mehta gestured at a table that had been laid out with dozens of shimmering, round, brilliant-cut diamonds worth millions of dollars. “These are regular,” he said, shrugging. “People know what this is. But after what happened”—he glanced at Lubeck—“people are looking for something different.”

The natural-diamond industry, which, with the advent of lab-grown gems, has been experiencing a prolonged and costly identity crisis, was thrilled by the ring, too. “What a diamond!” Al Cook, the beleaguered C.E.O. of De Beers Group, wrote in a LinkedIn post, which restrained itself to only one awkwardly interjected Swift lyric. (“Bejeweled!”) Cook became C.E.O. in 2023, not long before the business’s majority shareholder announced its intention to divest from the company. Later that year, De Beers cut prices across the board by more than ten per cent—a historically large reduction, according to Bloomberg. “Taylor’s ring might be extraordinary in its size and rarity,” Cook wrote. “But it is a reminder that every natural diamond is a unique and ancient treasure from the Earth.”

De Beers was formed in the late nineteenth century, when its reviled founder, Cecil Rhodes, consolidated the operations of a network of mines in South Africa, securing near-total control of the market there. Since then, the history of diamonds has essentially been a history of De Beers’s marketing campaigns. The company spent the better part of the twentieth century convincing Americans that the most valuable diamonds were heavy, brilliant, colorless, and free from internal flaws or external blemishes. But achieving this sort of purity is precisely what lab-grown diamonds do best.

In 2016, according to one industry analyst, a high-quality one-and-a-half-carat lab-grown diamond could sell for about ten thousand dollars—seventeen per cent less than the cost of a similar-quality natural diamond. Today, amid a glut of competition from labs in China and India, the price difference can be as high as ninety per cent. At Walmart, which started selling diamonds in 2022, a one-carat, lab-grown, round-cut solitaire engagement ring might retail for a hundred and fifty dollars. The natural-diamond industry seems to be betting that this price collapse will deter customers who want their rings to cost a meaningful amount of money. (There is still a prevailing belief that a diamond ring ought to cost a man two months of his salary—an idea that came from an old De Beers ad campaign which has taken on a life of its own since.)

But Americans love a good deal. A recent survey by the wedding-planning website the Knot found that more than half the engagement rings purchased in the U.S. featured lab-grown diamonds, a forty-per-cent increase from 2019. Last year, when the Natural Diamond Council put up fly posters in midtown Manhattan that featured blown-up photos of identical-looking diamonds labelled natural—“the OG”—and lab-grown—“the dupe”—it seemed only to underscore that we live in a society in which even wealthy women are buying Wirkins. Swift’s engagement ring might have set Kelce back something like a million dollars. But at Vrai, a lab-grown brand favored by Swift, fans can buy their own elongated, cushion-cut diamond for a thousand dollars or so.

“In the past, most people bought small, low-quality diamonds to fit in their budget, so there was an imbalance between what you desired and your reality,” Jean Dousset, a great-great-grandson of Louis Cartier, told me. After working in the high-jewelry business for decades at well-established houses such as Van Cleef & Arpels, he started his own brand in Los Angeles. Diamonds are typically graded based on four criteria: cut, clarity, color, and carat weight; shopping for one can become an exercise in deciding how much imperfection a couple is willing to tolerate in a symbol of their love. Dousset told me that he grew tired of selling couples natural diamonds with yellow coloring and internal flaws that cost tens of thousands of dollars. He didn’t feel that the price was worth it, and he saw the stress and tension it caused people. He pivoted entirely to lab-grown diamonds in 2023. (“I haven’t heard from my peers since,” he said.) Now it’s much easier for him to sell people what they want. The industry has “found the cure to enjoying buying diamonds,” Dousset said.

For some couples, synthetic diamonds have an ethical appeal. In the nineties, ghastly revelations about the mining conditions in countries such as Sierra Leone, shed harsh light on the back end of the business. Leonardo DiCaprio, the star of “Blood Diamond,” a blockbuster of dubious quality that nonetheless raised awareness about the issue, told Time that he would “certainly not” let his date wear diamonds to the Oscars, and later invested in Diamond Foundry, the most prominent American producer of lab-grown diamonds. Things have gotten better. In 2003, the United Nations implemented the Kimberley Process, a certification system to deter illegal trade; the program has eighty-six participating countries, and it is widely considered to be a successful intervention. But the taint lingers: bad actors still exist; mined diamonds figure in global money-laundering operations; and whatever its current partnerships De Beers was, after all, a company built on colonial exploitation. The sister of one of my friends, a sustainability adviser, told me last year that she gave her now fiancé explicit instructions that she did not want a “blood diamond.”

Still, lab-grown diamonds have yet to fully overcome their name. Christine Cheng, a fine-jewelry specialist, put it this way: Would you rather have a diamond formed naturally in the earth, “over millions of years,” or one “cooked in a microwave, basically?” She told me that antique diamonds offer a “secret third” option for buyers. “They were mined long ago, so we’re not using new resources,” she said. “When everyone has access now to a huge diamond that used to be the dream, how do you differentiate? How do you signal your taste? How do you signal your knowledge? It’s through connoisseurship of certain cuts, of certain designs from previous eras, and/or personalization. The status comes from a story.”

Very little about modern life is romantic; we get our thrills where we can. Gabrielle Katz, a publicist in New York who works with bridal businesses, told me that, after going through the indignities of looking for love on the apps, she wanted a ring that anchored her to a different sort of tradition. “I really went through the wringer with dating, so I was getting the real thing, in both a husband and a ring,” she said. Her fiancé proposed to her with an old-mine-cut diamond last summer, shortly before news broke of Swift’s engagement. “I have to be honest: thank God I had it first,” she told me.

The supply of antique diamonds is limited, so their audience will likely remain niche. If the status is in the story, then couples who swore off “blood diamonds” might not feel all that inclined to buy into a narrative that elides the conditions in which these gems were discovered; the alluvial diamond mines in, say, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil were largely run by enslaved laborers. Still, the aesthetic influence of stones like Swift’s is transforming the jewelry world. “Judging by the tens of millions of people who are showing their excitement on Instagram, we can now expect a resurgence in old mine cuts and other heritage ring designs,” Al Cook, the De Beers C.E.O., wrote. Simone Paasche, the co-founder of Spur Jewelry, a company that adapts heirloom jewels to modern tastes, told me that she’s seeing fewer “finance-bro engagement-ring flexes”—round, brilliant-cut diamond rings that cost something between twenty and thirty-five thousand dollars. Instead, people are requesting the sort of hand-engraving and antique-cut gems in which Lubeck specializes. There’s been an uptick in customers asking for something “ancient,” she said.

To remain relevant, natural-diamond companies are rewriting narratives about rarity and perfection, even if it means contradicting themselves. Brown diamonds, once considered so worthless that they were sometimes used in drill bits, are seeing a resurgence, as are other stones that have been considered “cloudy,” “milky,” and “textured.” In October, De Beers launched a campaign called Desert Diamonds, touting a collection of earth-toned diamonds that its executives likely would have sniffed at thirty years ago. After a press trip to Namibia, which was sponsored by De Beers, Tariro Makoni, a writer and brand strategist, wrote, “In my book— Cut, Color, Clarity is being replaced by Cut, Color, Clarity, and CHARACTER.”

After Sim Gems, Lubeck took me around the corner to a gemstones, diamonds, and jewelry wholesaler co-founded by Jay Moncada, whom Lubeck met at the Ethical Gem Fair in Brooklyn in 2023. The business sources stones that are much smaller and less rare than the ones we’d seen earlier that day, priced in the tens of thousands rather than the millions. More “down to earth,” Lubeck said.

In his office, Moncada, who was wearing jeans and a plaid button-down, pulled out a small Peruzzi-cut diamond. From some angles, it looked green; from others, it looked honey-yellow. “There’s so much happening in this one, I’m going a little bit cross-eyed,” Lubeck said, placing it in between the crevice of her ring and middle fingers. She passed me the magnifying glass. “Being in the era of A.I., when everything’s feeling computerized and automated, [it’s exciting] to get a stone where you’re, like, ‘This doesn’t look anything like that,’ ” she said. “There’s no uniformity. It doesn’t look machined—there was a human behind it. I think for me, that’s a huge draw. And I think I’m not alone in that.”

I’ll admit it: up until that moment, diamonds were not doing it for me. Garish gems seemed to be everywhere I looked. They distracted me during New York Fashion Week, when editors waved them around in the front row. Recently, on the subway, when a woman took her hand out of her pocket to reveal a diamond the size of a peanut M&M’s, I found myself blurting out, “Holy shit,” and reflexively backing away. Before meeting up with Lubeck, I had read a market analysis by McKinsey & Company that laid out, among other possibilities, a nightmare scenario for the mainstream diamond industry: “assuming consumers cannot tell the difference between natural stones and LGDs”—lab-grown diamonds—“all diamonds could simply go out of fashion, lose their appeal, and are no longer seen as a must-have for engagement rings.” It didn’t seem like such a bad outcome. Jewelers like Lubeck would be fine, and there are plenty of other alluring stones out there, like Montana sapphires. Of all the twentieth-century institutions to tear down, a place such as De Beers didn’t seem like the worst candidate.

Still, I was transfixed by the honeydew diamond. I thought back to a conversation that I’d had with Ope Omojola, a Brooklyn-based jewelry designer who prefers to work with natural stones. “They look like little terrariums,” she told me. “There are all of these geological circumstances that create unusual phenomena. Like, O.K., so you’re telling me that because of the circumstances of dripping water, heat, time, and all of these other things, now this piece of quartz has a blob of water trapped inside of it? And that water is tens of millions of years old? That’s crazy.” I imagined the many hands that the stone had passed through, the multiple marriages it might have seen. There was an appeal to the idea of an engagement ring that carried in it a residue of life.

Lubeck asked Moncada for a UV light. Sometimes diamonds undergo an elementary reaction during the crystallization process which produces a fluorescent glow under the UV. “I’m just always looking for weird things,” she said, with a shrug. The diamond lit up like a blue glow stick at a rave. This time, I was the one to gasp. “You’re telling me that if I wore this to laser tag or a bowling alley everyone else’s ring would stay quiet, and mine would—” I gestured as though a firework were exploding off my hand. Lubeck nodded and laughed: “Anything for a little attention.” ♦